Chicken Feed
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Connie and Carolina make a supply run on an isolated colony. Written for the RvB Ladies' Night on Tumblr, for the prompt "drive."


Espionage comes with its own vocabulary. Rendezvous. Handler. Asset.

A brush pass is a quick, casual trade-off of information or documents, meant to evoke spies in trenchcoats, ships passing in the night. In this particular instance, Connie brushes past a man in civvies, slips a flash drive into his pocket as he pauses to stare up at a gaudy advertisement. She's always had a talent for sleight-of-hand. Sometimes spy work is just pickpocketing in reverse.

Carolina doesn't notice. Carolina is, as always, focused on the goal: in this case, their shitty little rental jeep parked a few blocks away. She's also, to Connie's amusement, having some trouble navigating the crowded streets, perpetually getting snagged on elbows and fetching up against news stands. Connie moves in closer, ghosts hands over Carolina's shoulderblades, stays in her wake to avoid the idle shoving.

Erenia City is a glittering, sparkling mess. The weapons manufacturing plants in the industrial sector have been supplying a steady cashflow to the region, and the nouveaux riches flocking to the area have brought their cheerful disregard for anything remotely resembling practicality. They've already passed six identical boutiques offering diamond pendants fashioned after Elite armor. During the day, people throng to a writhingly crowded downtown that drains away to emptiness each night. This isn't a place where people live; it's a place where people _go_.

It's an isolated city on an isolated colony in an isolated system, and supply chains have been... disrupted, lately. The opportunity to stock up on weapons and intel is hard to turn down. The crowds also make it easy to, say, hand off intelligence to the proper authorities about a UNSC Project sinking further and further from its supposed mission. If one is so inclined.

"_Damn_ it," Carolina snarls, visibly restraining herself from flattening a passing jogger who catches her a glancing blow with his elbow. "I hate cities."

Connie hums thoughtfully, turning to watch the jogger navigate his way through the crowd. With the flash drive safely in enemy hands, her steps feel lighter already. She wonders if she could catch up with the guy, sprint past him, dodging through the barely-there gaps in the throng. It'd be easy to disappear. "Cities take practice. The anonymity's nice. You could be anyone, in a place like this. Nobody'd know the difference."

Carolina stops dead, squinting at a street sign. Connie offers apologetic smiles to the irritated commuters who have to modify their straight-arrow trajectories around this new obstacle. "God," Carolina says. "I don't even know where we're going. Give me a battlefield or some convoluted spaceship anyday. Cities are too, too—"

"—organic?" Connie nudges Carolina to get her attention, then points at their jeep, sitting half a block up the street.

"—annoying," Carolina finishes, with a slight, self-deprecating smile. "Okay. Let's get on the road."

As it turns out, Carolina is infinitely better at driving through cities than she is at walking through them. She takes to the good-natured ruthlessness of merging and signal-less turning like it's a battlefield, weaves in and out of impossibly small gaps in the traffic with a cheerful disregard for her own well-being. By the time they make it out of the city limits, onto a long, half-empty straightaway, Connie's palms are dotted with the crescent-moon imprints of her own fingernails.

"So," Carolina says. The jeep's not covered. Her hair is whipping around hypnotically in the wind; her voice is pitched to battlefield strength. "We get everything?"

Connie leans back, takes a quick inventory of the crates in the back, then sighs. "Yeah."

"Connie, we're members of an elite team posted on a ship with limited space."

"Yeah."

"We also have limited resources."

"Yeah."

"By which I mean we probably shouldn't spend our limited funds and limited space on an elaborate variation of the bucket-over-the-door booby trap. Even if it was on sale."

"But York," Connie says.

Carolina pauses, obviously considering this compelling argument, then says, reluctantly, "We're already running late for our extraction. We're going to get an earful from 479er as it is." She pauses, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip, then adds, "I think we could probably find a bucket somewhere on the ship."

"Deal." Connie digs into her pocket, pulls out the pack of cigarettes and the lighter purloined via a more traditional form of pickpocketing, then settles down to hunch in her seat and start the long, involved process of trying to light up in what is essentially a wind tunnel.

Carolina glances over at her, then does a double-take. "I didn't know you smoked."

Connie shrugs. "I don't, really." Her cupped hand finally provides enough shelter to get the cigarette started; the automatic filter catches and flares, starting the chain reaction that'll keep it from extinguishing until she turns it off. She takes a long drag, coughs around the smoke, and leans back in her seat. "Mom used to."

Another furtive glance, more guarded this time. Carolina gets like a trapped animal around heart-to-heart conversations, sometimes. "Don't think I've ever heard you talk about your family," she says, cautiously.

Connie shrugs again. The wind's catching her bangs, blowing them into her eyes, and the cigarette's a sharp, unpleasant taste against her tongue, but the passing scenery is quiet, blurred out. Soothing. "Not much to tell. We got along fine. Rest of the world didn't get along so great with us, is all."

"Huh," Carolina says. One last sidelong look, a slight smile, a flicker of unguarded warmth.

Connie hunches down in her seat and attempts to blow a smoke ring. The wind sends it straight back into her face and up her nose. She's still coughing and Carolina's still laughing by the time they pull up to the rendezvous point.

479er's brought a small crew to help unload the jeep and pile the crates into the Pelican. Connie spends the time grinding her cigarette butt into the dirt and staring out at the distant haze of the city, a gaudy, noisy mess of anonymity. Could be anyone, there, she thinks. It'd be easy to disappear.

A hand rests on her shoulder. "C'mon," Carolina says. "Time to go."

"Yeah," Connie says, and turns away. "Home sweet home."

Another piece of spy terminology: chicken feed. The perfectly true, perfectly innocuous details a double-agent deliberately feeds her compatriots to gain their trust.


End file.
